Meaning & readings
ocean, sea, foreign, Western style
On’yomi ヨウ
Nanori なだ、ひろ、ひろし、よ、よし
Origin
The character 洋 combines water (the left component) with a sound hint on the right. The water component makes sense for the ocean meaning — it's a basic radical used in many water-related characters. The right part gives you a clue to the pronunciation, sounding roughly like "yoh." Over time, the character came to mean not just ocean but also "foreign" or "Western," probably because ocean trade brought contact with foreign lands and Western culture to Japan.
Components
- 氵
- 羊
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 9
- Kangxi radical
- 85
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #763 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+06D0B